The Back Story of Hermeniculum Magazine
What is Hermeniculum and why to read it?
You are probably asking yourself, what is the ‘Hermeniculum’ and is it even a word? Long story short, it is a word, even though we made it up. (However, all words are made up after all.)
The Hermeniculum Magazine is, surprisingly, a Magazine of Hermeniculum: Institute of Popular Constitutional Hermeneutics (in short, Hermeniculum). Now, you are probably thinking it is not becoming any clearer. Keep with me for a few more lines.
Who is Hermeniculum
Hermeniculum is a group of scholars, scientists and artists from different disciplines who are convinced the law shouldn’t be only for lawyers, but should be in touch with the people and understandable to all. It is doubly true for the constitutional law as it deals with the very foundations of our political, legal and socio-economic system, including the basic rights.
Our mission
The main goal of Hermeniculum is to fight with the very limited knowledge of the general public about the above mentioned aspects of our society, i.e. how our political systems work and what is the role and rights of the citizens in them.
It would be easy to blame the general public for the lack of knowledge, however, the guilty ones are especially we, the scholars, who tend to communicate our work and findings only to fellow scholars and ignore our role of the interpreters of the quite complicated phenomena we are researching and the people are living in. After all, the text of the constitutions, statutory legislation or the case law is hardly a reading before bed (if we ignore the soporific effect of the legal text for many of its readers). It is a similarly ridiculous idea to expect the general public would get any information at all from our scholarly writing such as the various commentaries on constitutions — not because of their low quality, but simply because they are written for the lawyers, not the interested general public.
Hermeniculum is, therefore, aiming to present the knowledge about our political systems from the point of view of law, politics, economics, sociology, linguistics and other related disciplines, in an accessible way. The goal is not only to share the information about the topic, but also to demonstrate the scholarly writing, and the scholarly work itself, could be (at lest sometimes) quite humorous. Hermeniculum Magazine is one of the projects that should help to reach our goal by sharing articles about, and of, scholarly work in not-only-for-scholars form.
What is Hermeniculum
We have confessed ourselves at the beginning of this article, we have made the word Hermeniculum up. Therefore, it seems only fair to you who kept with us all the lines down here, to reveal what the word means.
Hermeniculum is derived from the Latin word hermeneuo (to translate, to interpret / explain) by adding the suffix -culum which is used to signify a tool or an instrument. Therefore, the word Hermeniculum could be translated as a tool for interpreting or an instrument for explaining something. The word hermeneutics has a very similar etymology.
If you are familiar with the Italian language you probably know the word Hermeniculum could have its very specific meaning — Hermes’ bottom (or Interpretative bottom, if you prefer).
See? I have told you the scholarly work could be quite humorous… or at least could try to be.
